1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a medical image information display apparatus, a medical image information display method, and a medical image information display program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, technologies for automatically detecting pathologies in organs using CAD (Computer Aided Diagnosis) have been developed in the field of medical image diagnosis. Accordingly, it has become possible to accurately assess and display diseased reasons or organs having the pathologies. In the technique described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2009-045286, a main branching structure is extracted from a medical image that represents the lung field, to determine the anatomical names of pulmonary segments. In the technique described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2008-093254, bone regions are extracted from tomographic images of a subject, and a projection image of the subject's bones are overlapped onto the tomographic images and displayed, to accurately assess the location of a nidus within the tomographic images, based on the positional relationship between the nidus and the bones.
Physicians and other diagnosticians perform diagnoses based on medical images that display organs extracted in this manner, and record the diagnostic results into electronic image observation reports.
However, in these conventional techniques, the contents of the image observation reports and pathologic regions within the medical images are not correlated. Therefore, it is necessary for physicians to search for pathologic regions within the medical images, when confirming pathologies described in the image observation reports. Conversely, it is also necessary to search for descriptions within image observation reports that correspond to pathologies within medical images, when referring to the image observation reports. That is, a burden exists that physicians need to assess the correspondent relationships between image observation reports and medical images.
Meanwhile, image observation reports, in which reference images are linked to text within image observation reports by hyperlinks, exist, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,899,684 B2. In this type of image observation report, it is easy to understand the correspondent relationship between image observation reports and medical images. However, a burden exists that troublesome linking operations, in which text portions within the image observation report are selected from among a great number of choices and the reference images are dragged and dropped onto the text portions, are necessary.